The Road Not Taken, Eh!

Wow!!! My deepest appologies to you, my readers. I have been slacking in the blog post department lately. I don't really have an excuse other than not having any time to really put together a quality post for you. I mean don't get me wrong but I don't spend my time away from work writing blog posts...that is Jordon-time. I'm currently working on a project where I have to put captions on about 10,000 photos of New York City waterfront structures. My brain has officially melted as I felt a little bit of it drip out of my ear the other day. Not to worry though, the Jordon's Deep Thoughts region of my brain is alive and well and ready to again crank out regular posts. So without further adieu, I present the first blog post of the 2007 fiscal year.

A few years ago I got a National Geographic special edition. The writers and photographers of the magazine were surveyed and had to submit their favorite places that they had been sent on assignment. The responses were assembled into a list of the "100 Places To Visit Before You Die." As I read through the glossy pages, I realized that I had been to a lot of them. I mean it was only 20 or so but considering I was only 24 at the time I figured I was way ahead of most people my age.

You see my parents were always the adventurous traveling-type. They personified the Robert Frost poem The Road Not Taken. (Included here for your reading pleasure)

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;
Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,
And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

So what does this have anything to do with this post? Well you see, like many, I have developed a list of "Things I Want To Do Before I Die." The list isn't long. Most of them involve traveling to some exotic place that my friends have never been. I just want to be able to say, "Yup, I've been there," or "Yup, I've tried that." Most people laugh when I tell them I want to go to every state or swim in all of the world's oceans. But I say to myself, "You can read everything about the World, but until you actually see it with your own two eyes (one if you are a cyclops), you haven't lived." So not to get too philosophical on you but that my friends brings us to today's post.

One item on my list is to travel to the extreme points of the United States. I have been to the northernmost and southernmost points. Next on the list was the easternmost: West Quoddy Head Lighthouse in Lubec, ME. First of all, Maine is huge. Go ahead, take a look at it. My cousin and I decided we were going to take a roadtrip this past weekend up to Maine to visit the easternmost point. You can read his account of it because this post is long enough as it is (See link at right). Not only did we visit Maine but we went all the way to Prince Edward Island in Canada.

What in the world is in Prince Edward Island that would make me want to drive all the way their and back in one weekend? The answer is pretty simple: nothing. That's right, the only reason I went was to check something off my list. Yeah I spent 28 of a possible 48 weekend hours in a car but so what. Otherwise I would have been sitting on my ass watching television. Of course the border police couldn't believe that we driving all the way to Canada just to "see as many provinces as possible" but that was the truth.

Nothing too funny came of this trip. We had to pay a $36 toll to cross a bridge. We decided that only 5,000 Americans could name all of the Canadian provinces and their capitals (Now it's 5,002). We ate at an American and Canadian Subway in the same day. "Jordon, that sounds like the biggest waste of time. Why would you waste a weekend driving to Canada and back?" you may ask. And in the words of Sir Edmund Hillary, "Because it was there."